Stuck?
Blocked?
The well dry?
Take a hike.
Literally.
You won’t be alone. Walking lets you follow in the steps of literary giants who came before you on this beaten path.
Follow the tracks of Henry David Thoreau, who did his sauntering, as he called it, in the woods of Concord, Mass., around the pond he made famous in “Walden.”
Walking created a direct correlation between Thoreau’s steps and his productivity.
“The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing,” Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, observed.
“If shut up in the house, he did not write at all.”
For Charles Dickens, walking was a habit that stretched from his youth as a law clerk and journalist in London to his emergence as a one of literature’s 19th century giants.
Insomnia often propelled Dickens on long nightly treks through Victorian London, soaking up settings for his novels.
Booking at an estimated pace of 4.8 miles per hour, Dickens also used his solitary walks as writing-in-his-head sessions.
Brainstorming by foot contributed to his astonishing productivity: 13,143 characters, populating more than 20 novels and stories. Wouldn’t you think?
Now that I’m over a tenacious case of bronchitis, I’ve resumed my morning walks.
I’ve adopted the 120-steps-per-minute pace of another famous walker, President Harry S. Truman. I’m keeping my walks to just 3,600 steps a day, equal in minutes to� aw, you do the math, please.
From experience, I know that it’s just as difficult for me to get up and walk every day as it is to plant myself in front of my computer.
But I never regret it when I do.
A simple walk, I’ve found, leads to:
� Renewed energy.
� Relaxation
� Brainstorming and mental problem solving
� Increased productivity
�Never a day without a line,� was the motto that Don Murray, my mentor and best friend, lived by.
To that, I’d add another mantra:
�Never a day without a step.�
So go ahead.
Take a hike.
Literally.
